World Oceans Day: Songs of Travel

Europeans artists and missionaries traveling to Asia in the sixteenth century promoted Western ideas of religion and art. Some of the artwork created during the Mughal Empire (in present-day India) confirms the emperor’s interest in Roman Catholic imagery and European styles of representation, as seen in the border of this Islamic folio.

On World Oceans Day, listen to La Mar de la Musica: Songs of Departure and Return, a concert held at the museum in 2007. The Vozes Alfonsinas ensemble, based in Lisbon, Portugal, and led by director Manuel Pedro Ferreira, performed Renaissance songs of travel that reveal how overseas influences altered Portuguese music (and vice versa). Four-part vocal harmonies were complemented by the sounds of Renaissance-era instruments, including the rebec, vihuela, and theorbo.

As Ferreira, a music professor who has written dozens of papers and books on medieval music and culture, explained in the concert notes:

The conquest of the Atlantic Ocean altered not only the history of Portugal but also its music. Up until the seventeenth century, the Portuguese nation was intimately connected to neighboring Spain. The discovery and populating of the Atlantic islands and the exploration of the west coast of Africa left their mark on the Iberian musical panorama of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The musical influence of the colonization of the Americas became apparent later.

Just as wine returns from a journey with characteristics different from those it originally had, so Iberian musical culture, once tempered by the Atlantic experience, acquired new compositional flavors. This performance calls attention to these outside influences by presenting some written vestiges of this “music of the return journey,” the greater part of which, dependent on oral tradition, has perished in the vortex of history.

These figures from the border of an Islamic folio created in India about the year 1600 depict St. Anthony (left), Christ and the Ship of Salvation, God the Father (upper right), and the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and St. John.

This concert took place on July 26, 2007, in conjunction with our exhibition Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries. The podcast was made possible through support from the Thaw Charitable Trust, and audio preservation and editing of this recording were supported by funds from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee.